THE WEST END, THE PERFORMING ARTS SCENE DISTRICT

Today, The Grandma has visited the West End of London, one of the most amazing places in London.

The West End of London (commonly referred to as the West End) is a district of Central London, London, England, west of the City of London and north of the River Thames, in which many of the city's major tourist attractions, shops, businesses, government buildings and entertainment venues, including West End theatres, are concentrated -and as such the term West End is used internationally as a metonym for London's theatre district and associated performing arts scene -just as Broadway is used to describe that of New York City.

The term was first used in the early 19th century to describe fashionable areas to the west of Charing Cross. The West End covers parts of the boroughs of Westminster and Camden.

While the City of London is the main financial district in London, the West End is the main commercial and entertainment centre of the city. It is the largest central business district in the United Kingdom. It is one of the most expensive locations in the world in which to rent commercial and office space.

Medieval London comprised two adjacent cities -the City of London in the east, and the City of Westminster in the west.

Over time they came to form the centre of modern London, although each kept its own distinct character and its separate legal identity (for example, the City of London has its own police force and is a distinct county).

The City of London became a centre for the banking, financial, legal and professional sectors, while Westminster became associated with the leisure, shopping, commerce, and entertainment sectors, the government, and home to universities and embassies. The modern West End is closely associated with this area of central London.

Lying to the west of the historic Roman and medieval City of London, the West End was long favoured by the rich elite as a place of residence because it was usually upwind of the smoke drifting from the crowded City. It was close to the royal seat of power at the Palace of Westminster (now home to parliament), and is largely contained within the City of Westminster (one of the 32 London boroughs).

The Great Fire of London didn't directly affect the West End a great deal, but the huge loss of housing in the City of London, led to a building boom in the west. This began with an initial development by Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans in the 1660s. Then during the late 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, it was built as a series of palaces, expensive town houses, fashionable shops and places of entertainment. The areas closest to the City around Holborn, Seven Dials, and Covent Garden contained poorer communities that were cleared and redeveloped in the 19th century.

As the West End is a term used colloquially by Londoners and is not an official geographical or municipal definition, its exact constituent parts are up for debate. Westminster City Council's 2005 report Vision for the West End included the following areas in its definition: Covent Garden, Soho, Chinatown, Leicester Square, the shopping streets of Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street, the area encompassing Trafalgar Square, the Strand and Aldwych, and the district known as Theatreland. The Edgware Road to the north-west and the Victoria Embankment to the south-east were also covered by the document but were treated as adjacent areas to the West End.

According to Ed Glinert's West End Chronicles (2006) the districts falling within the West End are Mayfair, Soho, Covent Garden, Fitzrovia and Marylebone. By this definition, the West End borders Temple, Holborn and Bloomsbury to the east, Regent's Park to the north, Paddington, Hyde Park and Knightsbridge to the west, and Victoria and Westminster to the south. Other definitions include Bloomsbury within the West End.

One of the City of Westminster wards is called West End. This electoral unit includes some of the most prosperous areas of the borough, including Soho, Mayfair and parts of southern Marylebone. The population of this ward at the 2011 Census was 10,575.

More information: Visit London

There's something about doing theatre in London
-it sinks a little bit deeper into your soul as an actor.
It's something about the tradition of theatre,
about performing on the West End stage.

Christian Slater

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER, A GENIUS OF MUSICAL THEATRE

Today, The Grandma has visited an old friend, Andrew Lloyd Webber, the English composer.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. 

He has composed 21 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. Several of Lloyd Webber's songs have been widely recorded and widely successful outside their parent musicals, such as Memory from Cats, The Music of the Night and All I Ask of You from The Phantom of the Opera, I Don't Know How to Love Him from Jesus Christ Superstar, Don't Cry for Me Argentina from Evita, and Any Dream Will Do from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. 

In 2001, The New York Times referred to him as the most commercially successful composer in history.

The Daily Telegraph named him in 2008 the fifth-most powerful person in British culture, on which occasion lyricist Don Black said that Andrew more or less single-handedly reinvented the musical.

Lloyd Webber has received numerous awards, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage for services to the arts, six Tonys, seven Olivier Awards, three Grammys (as well as the Grammy Legend Award), an Academy Award, 14 Ivor Novello Awards, a Golden Globe, a Brit Award, the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, and two Classic Brit Awards (for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 2008, and for Musical Theatre and Education in 2018).

In 2018, after Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special (Live), he became the thirteenth person to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.

The Really Useful Group, Lloyd Webber's company, is one of the largest theatre operators in London. Producers in several parts of the UK have staged productions, including national tours, of Lloyd Webber musicals under licence from the Really Useful Group. He is also the president of the Arts Educational Schools, London, a performing arts school located in Chiswick, west London. 

Lloyd Webber is involved in a number of charitable activities, including the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Nordoff Robbins, Prostate Cancer UK and War Child. In 1992, he started the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation which supports the arts, culture, and heritage of the UK.

 More information: Andrew Lloyd Webber

Lloyd Webber premiered The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty's Theatre in the West End in 1986, inspired by the 1911 Gaston Leroux novel. 

He wrote the part of Christine for his then wife, Sarah Brightman, who played the role in the original London and Broadway productions alongside Michael Crawford as the Phantom. The production was directed by Harold Prince, who had also earlier directed Evita. Charles Hart wrote the lyrics for Phantom with some additional material provided by Richard Stilgoe, with whom Lloyd Webber co-wrote the book of the musical. It became a hit and is still running in the West End; in January 2006 it overtook Lloyd Webber's Cats as the longest-running show on Broadway.

On 11 February 2012, Phantom of the Opera played its 10,000th show on Broadway. With over 14,200 London productions it is the second longest-running West End musical. The Broadway production closed on 16 April 2023, having played 13,981 performances, the most in Broadway history.

Lloyd Webber was born on 22 March 1948, at Westminster Hospital in London, the elder son of William Lloyd Webber (1914-1982), a composer and organist, and Jean Hermione Johnstone (1921-1993), a violinist and pianist.

In 1965, when Lloyd Webber was a 17-year-old budding musical-theatre composer, he was introduced to the 20-year-old aspiring pop-song writer Tim Rice. Their first collaboration was The Likes of Us, an Oliver! -inspired musical based on the true story of Thomas John Barnardo. They produced a demo tape of that work in 1966, but the project failed to gain a backer.

Lloyd Webber was asked to write a song for the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona and he composed Amics per Sempre-Friends for Life with Don Black providing the lyrics. This song was performed by Sarah Brightman and Josep Carreras.

On St George's Day 2024, he was appointed a Knight Companion of the Order of the Garter (KG).

More information: Instagram-Andrew Lloyd Webber

I don't know what really makes a great musical or not.
In the end, you write it, and you write it
because you want to write it.

Andrew Lloyd Webber